Stories, Tips, and Recipes from Our Garden and Kitchen

Q Is for Quiet

Boom! The North wall and upper floor of our house shook for a moment, as something large crashed–and startled us in mid conversation. Not knowing the source of the sound, and fearing that something upstairs had fallen or broken, I raced upstairs and found…nothing disturbed. Jean, meanwhile, had opened the patio doors and rushed around to the North wall, and found…that a massive fruit-laden branch of our neighbor’s peach tree had broken off high above and had crashed to the ground against our chimney. Dozens of unripe peaches still clung tightly to the many small branches that sprang from the large limb that had cracked off. But dozens more peaches lay along the path and by the fence between our houses. The limb itself had not broken the fence in its fall–a miracle, given the sound.

I write about this now because I’ve been thinking about the quiet of the garden. Right now I’m listening to the summer breeze gently percuss the green leaves of that same peach tree outside my window. I watch the branches play hide-and-seek with the afternoon sun. This is a quiet breeze today, the kind that makes me feel cool, as if I were outside in the shade of the tree and feeling the soothing touch of the wind on this 90+ degree July day.

Quiet in a garden does not mean without sound.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt absolute silence in our garden. Would I want that? I don’t think so. No, the quiet of a garden is that mix of soft sounds that together bring quiet of the mind. The gentle waves of wind in the trees, bumble bees in the lupines, honeybees in the roses and orange blossoms, the tick-tick of the hummingbirds and the whirr as they scoot past, the three-note cooing of the collared doves, the constantly changing soprano arias of the morning mockers and warblers, even the skree of the grumpy rock jays, and even the crunch-crunch of the mulch and leaves beneath my shoes.

We do not live in a quiet place, even though it is quiet-ER by some standards. The interstate is only a mile away, and its waves of rushing sound never disappear, night or day. The street right outside too often serves as a fantasy strip for motorcyclists and teenagers in over-powered pickups or old coupes. Freight and commuter trains come through our town hourly night and day, and their engineers conscientiously blast their symphonic horns at every intersection. On weekends, some of my fellow DIYers use table or chain saws as their tools of choice, while gas-powered trimmers and leaf-blowers are also always popular.

I’ve lived in louder places and quieter places, city apartment buildings vs. suburban cul de sacs far from freeways, factories, and freight rail. In the two places in my life where I have been fortunate to have a wooded, green space, I have relished the soft concerts of birdsong and breezes in the trees. Only in my current space, so late in my life, have I had the luxury to build a garden, to watch it change day by day, year by year; to attract the skilled musicians who can put a morning concert together extempore and make it always fresh, always soothing–despite the surrounding noise.

The garden is not silent, but it is quiet–garden-quiet, a kind of quiet not like anything else. A quiet that can even include the winds that blow down fences in January (see J Is for January) and even the occasional crashing branch of a peach. On summer mornings like today’s, it sounds pretty much like the following. Give a listen.